Is NASA Being Set Up To Fail (Again)? Analysis

According to space analyst Rand Simberg, Congress is putting pork before progress by micromanaging NASA, asking them to do too much with too little, and, once again, setting America's space agency up for failure.

In all of the furor over the president's new space policy, announced in February with the release of its planned NASA budget, and with all of the hyperbolic commentary about how commercial space isn't ready to take on the tasks of delivering astronauts to orbit, one stark fact has received far too little attention. Simply put, NASA has not successfully developed a new launch system in three decades. The last one was the Space Shuttle, and it was successful only by the minimal criteria that it eventually flew.

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It has not been for lack of trying. The history of the agency over the past quarter of a century is littered with failed attempts to build a new system to replace it. This extends from the X-30 Orient Express of the late eighties and the X-33/VentureStar program of the late nineties, through the Space Launch Initiative early in this decade, to the recently canceled Ares program.

Last fall, the Augustine panel had declared that Constellation (which consisted primarily at that point of the Ares I launcher and the Orion crew capsule) was on an "unsustainable trajectory." Part of the intent of the new space policy was to recognize that building cost-effective space transportation is not now and has never been the agency's strong suit, and to refocus it on those things (such as exploration beyond low earth orbit) that it does well.

Unfortunately, the White House and the space agency didn't adequately coordinate with Congress before it rolled out its new plan, and it ran into a buzz saw on the Hill, because for most of those overseeing the NASA budget there, the primary purpose of the agency is not to accomplish useful things in space, but to ensure continued jobs in the states and congressional districts of its overseers.

Over the past two weeks, the empire has struck back.

The Senate's Take

A couple weeks ago, the Senate subcommittee that authorizes NASA budgets demanded that the agency initiate development of a heavy-lift vehicle starting next year, rather than by 2015, as the administration had planned. The rocket scientists on the subcommittee, led by Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, designed the rocket for them. It is to be capable of delivering seventy tons of payload to orbit, and it must use the shuttle launch pads and solid rocket boosters that the shuttle does.

In addition to the Nelson rocket, the Senate also revived the Orion crew capsule, not as the lifeboat to which the White House relegated it last year, but as a full-fledged exploration vehicle, uneuphoniusly rebranded the multipurpose-crew-vehicle (MPCV). Not surprisingly, this is likely to cause it to grow to the point at which it cannot be launched on an existing vehicle, such as the Delta or Atlas, providing a justification for the new vehicle, even though it's oversized for that mission. It also adds one additional shuttle flight next year (for which no one has expressed a need). To pay for this, it initially proposed to significantly reduce funding available for the Commercial Crew program, particularly next year, from half a billion to only $300 million.

The House's Gutted Version of the Plan

If the Senate plan was disappointing to those supporting the new commercial direction, for both orbital and suborbital spaceflight, the House version, revealed a few days later, was disastrous. It virtually eliminated the commercial crew (cutting it by 96 percent from an overall budget of $6 billion over the next few years to only $250 million). Also, for no obvious reason, it slashed the already paltry $15 million next year for the Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research program, which would have gone to allow NASA grantees and researchers to purchase rides for their experiments, to $1 million for each of the next two years, with no allocations beyond that. And rather than design a new rocket, as the Senate did, it was clear that the House wanted to resurrect Ares I itself, with its language about "leveraging" work on existing vehicles. This was fairly unsurprising, given that subcommittee chairwoman Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), who happens to be married to astronaut Mark Kelly, has been one of the harshest critics of the new plan.

The commercial space industry, eager to seize at least half a loaf, quickly rallied around the Senate version of the authorization, and the White House itself said that it was an acceptable "compromise." That version was reflected last week in the Senate appropriations markup (the bill that really counts when it comes to funding). What will come out of the conference to reconcile the House and Senate versions, and whether or not the president will ultimately sign the result, remains to be seen.

Ignoring Augustine

The problem with both congressional versions of the new authorization is that they completely ignore last fall's warnings of the Augustine panel, to which the White House responded by revealing the new plan in February.. Developing (let alone operating) a NASA-dedicated launcher and crew module was unaffordable under the old plan. Nothing has happened to reduce the projected costs of either Ares or Orion, yet Congress has demanded that they continue while providing them with even less funding than they were projected to get under the old plan reviewed by the Augustine panel.

>YearFY10 BudgFY11 Auth Shortfall
2011
$1.9B

$1.3B
$0.6B
2012
$2.1B
$1.4B
$0.7B
2013

$1.9B
$1.4B
$0.5B
Total
$5.9B
$4.1B
$1.8B

The first dollar column is the planned runout for each fiscal year from Mike Griffin's last budget request for Orion: the second is the proposed Senate authorization for the MPCV. There is a $1.8 billion shortfall for the first three years alone. This is just a hint at the problem. The GAO had estimated last year that Ares I and Orion were still $35 billion to $50 billion from completion, with a low confidence level of first flight in 2017 (i.e., a seven-year "gap" after the planned 2010 end of the shuttle). With the shuttle extension, and continuation of ISS, there is simply no budget for that, let alone the new heavy lifter that the Senate proposes, which doesn't even leverage the billions already spent on Ares I.

Beyond that, the fixed cost of maintaining the shuttle infrastructure will continue to make for very high average launch costs, and using the shuttle-derived heavy lifter as a crew vehicle means that it will either fly partially empty, or that crew and cargo will be mixed. This would violate one of the safety lessons of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, as astronaut John Grunsfeld noted last week. In addition, if the vehicle ends up being a sidemount for the crew/cargo (as shuttle manager John Shannon briefed the Augustine panel on last year), it will make it much more hazardous for aborts, with the need for the capsule to avoid contact with the external tank during a launch escape maneuver.

The Bottom Line

NASA is being asked to do too much with too little by Congress, and, once again, America's space agency is set up for failure. If this plan goes forward, it will preserve jobs in Utah, Alabama, Texas and Florida, but contribute little to actually accomplishing things in space. And we can expect to have to assemble another panel of experts a couple of years from now to tell us once again what we already know, and what Congress will continue to ignore, because pork will always reign over progress.